This hard-to-find Fukasaku/Kurahara collaboration is an interesting coming-of-age story. The boy Shisuke grows up in a coal mining community in Kyushu, during and after the Second World War, and the viewer is treated to the
circumstances that shape the young man who emerges. Read More »
Two reporters from competing newspapers and different moral setups investigate a drug ring, delving deeper into the underworld in the process.Read More »
壁の中の秘事
Three or four different stories of people living in the same apartment complex, adultery couple, student lost in voyeurism or just a lonely wife. Emotions and feelings generated by poor oppressive architecture, social study of post-war Japan, dramas of family life.Read More »
Summary from yesasia – “It has been three years since pop auteur Iwai Shunji’s last film Hana and Alice, and his latest offering may seem a bit surprising. In a marked departure from his previous youth-centric works, his new film is a documentary about legendary director Ichikawa Kon, whom Iwai cites as one of his greatest influences. In a momentous career spanning over fifty years, 91-year-old Ichikawa Kon has long established himself as one of the great masters of Japanese cinema. A lifetime his junior, 44-year-old Iwai Shunji has, through acclaimed films like Swallowtail Butterfly and All About Lily Chou-Chou, emerged with a distinct voice and language of his own amongst the current generation of filmmakers.Read More »
A poor Chinese laborer learns important lessons after his son gets a strange new toy.
Plot:
Construction worker Ti (Stephen Chow) lives in a ramshackle shanty and scavenges everything from shoes to toys from the trash dump. Despite his state of abject poverty, the earnest, lesson-spouting Ti is determined to send his son Dicky (Xu Jiao) to a posh private elementary school. Dicky, however, is a lot more interested in playing than studying, and he’d like nothing more than a CJ1 robot dog to show up his bullying classmate. Unable to afford a CJ1, Ti brings home “CJ7”, a curious rubbery green ball he found at the dump. His son isn’t impressed – until the ball shows its true alien form, morphing into a little green dog whose penchant for mischief gives even Dicky a run for his money. Stephen Chow has helped launched the careers of many a starlet, and this time CJ7 co-stars Mainland newcomer Kitty Zhang and talented child actress Xu Jiao who genderbends as Chow’s son. Chow was so impressed with Xu Jiao’s performance, he not only has more plans in store for the budding ingenue, he’s adopted her as his goddaughter. Other key comedy players include portly Stephen Chow regular Lam Chi Chung and the cuddly titular alien that serves as another testament to Chow’s ability to effectively integrate state-of-the-art CGI into his films.Read More »
Quote:
Yanagimachi’s first feature film is about a young man who makes a map of a neighborhood in which he delivers newspapers. He keeps a dossier on each family, recording their habits and rating how much he dislikes them. One family, for example, gets an X because their dog barks all the time. Another man gets an X because he refuses to pay his bill. What turns all this scary is that the young man declares “I’m a right-winger!” and starts ruthlessly calling in bomb threats on these families. He psychologically abuses the crippled mistress of his roommate until she is driven to the brink of suicide. Rather than coming up with pat explanations for such anti-social behavior, Yanagimachi only describes the actions and lets the viewer decide why these things are happening. Questions of personal responsibility versus societal influences are completely left to the viewer to sort out.Read More »
Quote:
LEAD TOMBSTONE tracks the progress of a young sociopathic rake who had, immediately post-WW2, rescued his country farmer mother from rape by stabbing the offending American soldier in the back with a pitchfork. Once grown, the boy continues his violent life as a hoodlum on the run, repaying an outlaw couple who have sheltered him by raping the wife, then, at his boss’s behest, murdering the husband. He’s also not above strangling a girl in her bathtub for kicks. The one spot of normalcy in his life is his shop girl girlfriend, an innocent who, once she discovers his other life, confronts his boss..Read More »
Quote:
Sado is a third base man in a high school baseball team. He has a friend, Shinbunbu, who is an editor for the school newspaper. As a plan to make money, the two one day decide to become pimp and prostitute. However, after killing a gangster in a conflict, Sado gets caught and ends up in juvenile delinquent hell.
The movie was targeted for a high school audience with what would have been an outrageous adventure for a high school student for that time in Japan. Such occurrence is no longer novel in Japan today where high school girls become their own pimps, but back in 1978 the theme of the movie was quite shocking and sensational.Read More »
Quote:
A married man has been driven to the edge by a boring job, a talkative wife, unbearable children and their cramped living quarters. He gets some chloroform and a gas mask, gains illegal entry into the quarters of an attractive waitress he likes, puts on his gas mask, sprays chloroform around her room as she sleeps, and when she is thoroughly knocked out, he has sex with her. Although he carries out these nightly activities with other women as well, he keeps on coming back to the waitress, and in order to offer something in return, he sometimes washes her clothes or fixes her food before she wakes up.Read More »